Thread: Evergreen saplings coming up in my lawn!

I purchased a new home in December and the contractor had already planted grass in the front, side, and back yard. It looked fairly thick, but appeared to need some overseeding. Now that the weather has gotten nicer, I have been working on the lawn. I noticed that there was a lot of dead grass material throughout the lawn, so I used a thatching rake to remove most of it. After I was done, my lawn is about 60% grass and 40% bare spots. So I went and purchased some seed and peat moss and would like to overseed the entire lawn.

Now here is where I ran into a problem. Over the past week or so, I noticed that there are saplings that are springing up through the grass throughout my lawn. My property boarders a "protected wetland" area and most of the saplings appear to be in the 5'-10' area of lawn that boarders the wetland area. I've attached a couple of pictures from in a nearby flower bed of the saplings that are coming up in the grass area. I believe these are evergreens? Anyways, I am wondering what the best way to kill these saplings would be. Is there something that I could spay them with that won't kill the grass? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

It's hard for me to tell from the picture, what these are exactly. We have something around here that looks very similar to that that only grows 8-10'' in height and that's it, then the following yr it starts again. As far as soft woods in this area we have a newer problem, boring beetles are destroying the trees fast, I try to save what I can.

I tried to pull them by hand (also tried using a weed popping tool), but I am only able to get a few inches of the root and the rest breaks off in the ground. I'm not entirely sure that they are evergreens... maybe a fern of some kind? Either way, I'd prefer to be able to spray something to kill them off and not have to continually have to try to pull them by hand unsuccessfully.